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404's and a drop in Rank - Site maps? Data Highlighter?

I managed an old (2006 design) ticket site that was hosted and run by the same company that handled our point of sale. (Think, really crappy, customer had to click through three pages to get to the tickets, etc.) In Mid February, we migrated that old site to a new, more powerful site, built by a company that handles sites exclusively for ticket brokers. (My site: TheTicketKing. - dot - com)

Before migration, I set up 301's for all the pages that we had currently ranked for, and had inbound links pointing to, etc. The CMS allowed me to set every one of those landing pages up with fresh content, so I created unique content for all of them, ran them through the Moz grader before launch, etc. We launched the site in Mid February, and it seemed like Google responded well. All the pages that we had 301's set up for stayed up fairly well in rank, and some even reached higher positions, while some took a few weeks to get back up to where they were before. Google was also giving us an average of 8-10K impressions per day, compared to 3000 per day with the old site. I started to notice a slow drop in impressions in mid April (after two months of love from Google,) and we lost rank on all our non branded pages around 4/23. Our branded terms are still fine, we didn't get a message from Google, and I reached out to the company that manages our site, asking if they had any issues with their other clients. They suggested that I resubmit our sitemaps. I did, and saw everything bump back up (impressions and rank) for just one week. Now we're back in the basement with all the non branded terms once again. I realize that Google could have penalized us without giving us a message, but what got me somewhat optimistic was the fact that resubmitting our sitemaps did bring us back up for around a week.

One other thing that I was working on with the site just before the drop was Google's data highlighter. I submitted a set of pages that now come back with errors, after Google seemed to be fine with the data set before I submitted it. So now I'm looking at over 300 data highlighter errors when I'm in WMT. I deleted that set, but I still get the error listings in WMT, as if Google is still trying to understand those pages. Would that have an effect on our rank? Finally I do see that our 404's have risen steadily since the migration, to over 1000 now, and the people who manage the CMS tell me that it would have no effect on rank overall. And we're going to continue to get 404's as the nature of a ticket site would dictate? (Not sure on that, but that's what I was told.) Would anyone care to chime in on these thoughts, or any other clues as to my drop?

4 Responses

Did the language of your website change, meaning did you move from .aspx to .php or .html? If so we have experienced a similar situation where thousands of old pages were indexed by Google, once the site was moved to a new language we were penalized until we redirected all of the old pages.

No, we stayed with .aspx. I was also told that we received a call from "Google" coming into our main telephone number, and it was an automated call that asked about changes to the site, and if we would like to speak to a live person. By the time the call was transferred, we lost the call. (twice.) That could have been someone from Adwords, as I was also reaching out to them about some other things. The weird part about the call was that the receptionist swears that she heard "We're calling to confirm changes to your site." before she tried to transfer the call to my office. I have never heard of Google calling regarding WMT, or site changes.

I'm assuming you changed the name of all the urls' to some degree? If you kept the structure of the site and the name of the pages the same, I don't think you'd see this happening. If you did restructure and rename, you may have triggered an automatic algo penalty. I would check the external link profile to see what keywords are linking back to you. If the new urls are different from the old, that may have been the cause of the drop. 404's are always a concern, especially with old sites since there could be hundreds of pages that you may have thought were dormant, but Google keeps visiting. Even though these pages may not be linked anywhere, Google has them indexed and is still visiting. Same goes with images! They may be missing on the new server. But from what I understand, such 404's will correct themselves over time, as Google will un-index them.

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